Moderns and postmoderns are very good at getting all the minutia of the details correct, but they are not as good at getting the story right.  The Who, What, When and Where are exquisitely laid out and footnoted to perfection but the Why leaves something to be desired.  The element of story is inevitable.  But by chasing those details as they do, the modern often create a story that is the wrong story.  A book review is the story of the story.  It is a suggestion of how a book might interact with you or the general you.  What is Metaxas doing?  What is he trying to do to you?

I am irrevocably in love with C. S. Lewis.  I know his flaws and I know his loves and I want to be his friend and to get into arguments with him.  His final work An Experiment in Criticism, is forever with me.  He teaches us to resist the modern literary temptation to find only ourselves in any given text.  This is not only a fad in our day, it is the established doctrine, of Modern Literary Criticism.  When the Creator God is removed from the equation, all sense of a moral landmark is removed.  Meaning becomes whatever you want it to be.  The Moderns said truth was what made society work best.  The Postmodern says truth is whatever makes you work best.  But Lewis thought this silly.  It really is the definition of narcissism.  And like Narcissus gazing into the mirror and falling in love with himself.  We do the same thing when we gaze into a piece of art, particularly in Lewis’ work, when we gaze into a book.  It is the most natural thing in the world to use a book to reinforce ideas that we like.  To titillate certain grammatical fetishes.  To attack the people we want to attack.  But the highest goal should be to make ourselves better, to get outside of ourselves and to see our situation from another perspective that we might change.

The same thing is true of people.  We can fail to appreciate some of the amazing gifts in another person which could teach us valuable lessons, by simply using another person or imposing ourselves onto them.  And this applies to the writing of biography.  And I believe this is what Metaxas does too much.  I was a little surprised.  I have heard Metaxas speak well of C. S. Lewis.  There is nothing Lewis loved more than the Medieval world.  It was a time before rigid modernism took over.  It was the age of rich stories and metaphors before the machine. Merlin spoke poetry to get what he wanted from the created order, our engineers use science.  But it was not simply that these were the hallmarks of this time but that all times were like this and this was the last one before Modernism put them away.  Luther changed a lot of that, by accident.  And Metaxas takes much of that for granted.  He occasionally mentions it.  That we must put on our thinking caps and try to imagine a time where . . ., to think of a time without. . .  But I don’t think he does a very good job.  Rather than bring us into the Medieval world of Luther he champions the things we like and tries to pull them out of Luther.  No mention is made of the trade offs and the things which might have been lost by the changes.  And just as often as not he mocks Luther’s time, and all it’s predecessors.  Because I don’t think he cares for it at all, much less loves it. He wants to fly the chopper into those dark dirty times and pull out Luther and then fly out with his prize.

In telling the story of this book, I think of the Author and his previous work on Bonhoeffer.  And it really makes sense.  American Christians define themselves today based on disliking the Catholic Church and disliking the Nazis.  So these are the perfect heroes.  Luther who broke the hold of the Catholic Church and Bonhoeffer who resisted Hitler.  I mused to myself that his next biography should be on William Wilberforce.  Because the trifecta would be to champion the man who attacked slavery.  And just searching Amazon I laughed out loud at finding he already had.  It is always nice to have one’s theory confirmed.  But this is the point, this is the problem.  Reinforcing what you already believe is narcissism, and Metaxas does it too much.

Obviously a successful way to sell books today is to tickle the publics fancy.  And the more complex the scaffold upon which you display this fancy the better.  We are sophisticated moderns, we must have our reasons and our facts and our data—if one is to tantalize us.  It is a sort of scientific fairy story.  It is a device used to smuggle in ideas, but unfortunately the only ideas that get smuggled in our the ones you already have.   We go to fairy land and find that we are fine, we have no flaws.  Hello darkness my old friend,  keep me from the light it makes my eyes hurt.   So Luther who loved the Catholic church so much that he was forced to try and reform her, is made to be the founder of the American pluralistic republic.  Oh sure there are a few steps in there, but basically that’s what he did.  And never mind that part about him not passing our ridiculous modern metal detector of racism.  That’s the one part where Metaxas works his best magic to try and understand his times.  And mostly he just sweep it under the rug, because, yay ‘merica!  And in this Metaxas even gets one glaring fact wrong.  As if to gloss over other developments in political though Metaxas all but give Luther credit for the founding of the United States as a country without religion.  He even states that this nation was founded on the idea that no state or the country as a whole could establish a religion.  Which is precisely not the case.  “When the Constitution was adopted, 9 of the 13 colonies had established religions at the state level. The longest surviving of these was the Congregational Church in Connecticut, which was supported by that state down into the 1830’s.”  https://dougwils.com/books/kicking-one-of-the-sacred-geese.html

But Luther was not a racist.  He simply said what scripture says, in a language we are too cowardly to understand.  If Luther spoke in our churches today, we would revive the dead doctrine of church discipline and run him out of town.  He would be on CNN as worse than Trump.  The fact is the Jews were a stiff necked people the Bible says so explicitly.  And it displays that fact throughout every book.  But the point was that this be an example to us.  We are just as bad, if not for Grace we would be worse than the Jews.  That’s the point.  Hitler used the words of Martin Luther, not because Luther was a closet anti-semite, but because Hitler was a liar.  It was the same motivation for any scripture he quoted.    If you think the fact that the Jews killed Jesus and reject him to this day is a reason to kill them, you are insane.  But to heed Luther’s warning at their false doctrine, is not bad advice even for today.

And of course when the topic of the Muhammedans comes up Metaxas has to fawn over them and be aghast at the notion that Luther would dare criticize them. This like most in any academic fields these days, in stark opposition to all of our forefathers.  Perhaps his next biography could be on the Armenian, genocide by the Turks.  No probably not, and even if it were not suppressed like a recent movie on the subject, it wouldn’t sell very well.  And you wouldn’t want to offend the Muhammedans, they might blow you up.  And rather than thinking that perhaps a people who blow you up for telling the truth may not actually be all that virtuous today, to say nothing of their past barbarities, it’s a lot easier to just tow the party line and shame Luther for daring the speak out against them.

It is these and many more cultural markers of our day, which lead me to believe that this is less a story about Luther and more a story about us.  I could probably never write a book this long nor do all the research necessary to write it.  It is an achievement.  But I really think we might be better off reading biographies of the time by Catholic Hilarie Belloc.  It is good for us to hear the other side of the story.  His How the Reformation Happened, is very good.  He does not strictly toot the Catholic horn,  he calls things for what they are.  And in reading such a book, which is not only shorter, but more deep as to the small why of this event and the bigger Why of all events, you will grow.

The story of Luther is not totally buried in this biography by Metaxas.  He was a meticulous German lover of scripture, in all it’s fine details.  He took things very literally and seriously.  He wanted the church to repent and be all that she could be.  He had flaws and things he advocated for got out of hand, caused problems and failed in a lot of ways in Germany.  But the ‘why’ and  the story Metaxas tells are all wrong.  It feeds our worst problems and fails to help us appreciate Luther  and his life in his time for what it was.  It just puffs us up in our time.  And what at time it is where a people demands such works.  If you want more details about Luther read the book but skip the Epilogue.  And first get some appreciation of the Medieval world by reading C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image.